[Wikimania-l] Comments

[Austin Hair]

I've been busy all week, so when I finally caught up with this thread
I found myself marveling at the complaints of inexperienced travelers,
acknowledging several fair gripes about this year's venue,
appreciating the more insightful points by some posters, and being
particularly encouraged by Patricio's post.

As a veteran Wikimania organizer, and having participated in the
selection process for every Wikimania to date, I could write an essay
on what I think about our annual conference (which, despite the
inevitable problems, people still attend).  I'll try to be brief here,
though.

No conference venue is going to be perfect.  One year there won't be
enough snacks; another venue won't have adequate power ports in
certain areas; a country might have too many poor people.  (Read up,
these are actual complaints cited in this thread alone.)  No
conference venue, period, is going to have adequate WiFi—I do this for
a living; I taped access points to walls in Frankfurt, and the fact is
that it's not a perfect technology.  (It's not even a particularly
good one, actually, but we manage.)

Every year those involved learn from the previous year's mistakes, and
we make new ones.  Because every venue is different, new problems will
occur that were never anticipated in the past.  What makes Wikimania
great is just getting everyone together in one place, and though I'm
not going to say "kwitcherbitchin," I will say that some of the
complaints I've seen simply aren't helpful.  This said, I hope people
keep posting, because I'd rather roll my eyes at a noob comment than
risk missing out on a good point.

I'm looking forward to Wikimania 2009.  Patricio and his team are
impressively dedicated to doing this right, and have practically
treated the last two Wikimanias as a case study—and good thing, since
each one gets harder and harder to top.  I have no doubt we won't be
disappointed.

Austin

P.S.  Since all we've seen are the unpleasant arrival stories, I want
to relate mine: I arrived in Cairo at 3:55 a.m., spent a mere 30
minutes buying a visa and getting through passport control, got a cab
to the hotel my friends had checked into a few hours before, got a key
from reception, crashed for a few hours, had a leisurely breakfast,
got a cab to the train station, took a train to Alexandria, and got a
cab to another hotel.  All it takes is a little prior research and
planning, and a little bit of savvy.  Yes, along the way I was waylaid
by unscrupulous cab drivers in the airport, had my driver disrupt a
wedding, waited an hour in the heat of the Cairo train station, had to
negotiate a seat swap with another passenger to sit with my friends,
watched as a cab driver spent five minutes banging on his engine with
a pair of pliers to get his '72 Lada running again, and overpaid for
most everything, only to spend the next two nights with three beds
crammed into a particularly small room of a colonial hotel; although I
realize not everyone finds this sort of thing fun as I do, you have to
manage your own expectations.  There are no golden carriages in the
developing world.